Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…

Thursday, August 05, 2010

Better Red than Fed

At the heart of the Bailadila Hills in central India lie 1.1 billion tons of raw ore so pure and plentiful that half a century after miners first hacked at it with pickaxes, it remains the richest, and one of the largest, iron deposits on the planet.

Enter the spoiler.

Yet on this quiet June day, cobwebs hang on rusted pipes in the all-but-abandoned facility, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its September 2010 issue. Caretakers prepare to switch truck-size rock crushers out of their coma, rousing the machines for five minutes a month to ensure they still work.

Maoist rebels from the surrounding Dandakaranya forest armed with guns and explosives -- and some wielding axes and bows and arrows -- attacked the facility four times in little more than a year, officials at the now-mothballed plant say. They burned 54 trucks waiting at factory gates in April 2008 and damaged part of the slurry pipeline, the world’s second longest, in June 2009. Essar idled the plant that month.

One constant of the universe seems to be that Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-whatevers seem to enjoy their destructive revolutionary fervor more than their any affection that they have for “the proletariat”. In fact “the good of the people” seems more like a distant, ignorable abstraction to them more than they are to those of any other belief system.

Maoist-related violence killed a record 998 people last year as assaults on economic targets reached an all-time high, according to Ministry of Home Affairs data.

A Mumbai-bound train derailed in May, killing at least 146 people, after what police suspect was sabotage by a Maoist group. More than 200 security officers died in attacks in the first six months of 2010.

More specious still, for them to say that they were “sucked into the conflict” blithely ignores the fact that the Maoists are the ones who created it.

Much as they carry on the lie of “wanting to give the landless land”, they must sport a rather broad shit-eating grin when it comes to that idea that given confiscation, collectivization, and nationalization, everyone will be landless – and become a (fixed, unchanging) wage slave of the monopoly help by the state. It is the very essence of the empirialism that they pretend to, and pretend to call their foe.

How, for example, with their passion for heavy industry and such, are they to “redistribute” ore? This goes unsaid, even though there might be some terroristic vision that it’s better for all to remain poor than for one person, some owners, some engineers, etc., to succeed.

Invoking the usual laundry list of supposed virtues, they include things like “social justice”, exhibiting an ignorance of the singular distinction of Maoism to the rest of the Red rationalizations: Mao didn’t believe in it. He believed that the state had to be personified by the strongman controlling it, so that the people could, undistracted, go on with the business of constructing his autocratic empire on the footing of equally distributed misery. More ignorant still is the emphasis the Indian Maoist place on social tribalism, as though this protecting of ones’ own was plausibly permissible in a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist vision. It more resembles the ironic place leftist feminism tries to occupy in that respect than any rigorously reasoned form of the classical leftist serfdom models of proletariat-based arguments.

These ignorant oafs don’t even know their own suicidal belief system. It’s personified by this elitist tripe of thinking that:

“The Indian revolution must take the road of relying on the peasants, establishing base areas in the countryside, persisting in protracted armed struggle and using the countryside to encircle and finally capture the cities,” the Communist mouthpiece said on July 5, 1967.

The vision holds that the only purpose the hardworking have is not to their own lives and well being, but to the power of the revolution’s elite. They damned-well BETTER love the people! It’s YOUR struggle, and THEIR revolution!